I spent several hours putting together a super-nerdy Keyboard Maestro script that saves an Apple Mail message as a PDF and then uses some AppleScript to pull data out of the message and use it in the file name. I’ve already added the video, the Keyboard Maestro Script, and the AppleScript to the Keyboard Maestro Field Guide. Below you can watch the video and download the AppleScript here.
Today Flexibits announced Fantastical Premium for Families. With it, you can get up to 5 family members in Fantastical for $7.99 a month. If you’ve got more than a few members of your family on Fantastical, that’s a nice discount. It’s also an excellent excuse to put the rest of your family on Fantastical. With Fantastical’s power features, it runs circles around the built-in calendar app. Want to learn more about Fantastical? There is a free Field Guide for that.
For the last few months, I have been playing with an Oculus Quest. I never really had any experience with virtual reality (VR) before, and I decided that there was no better time to look for a little escape than amid the pandemic.
The technology is impressive, yet I don’t find myself spending more than a few hours a week in virtual space. Of course, there is a Star Wars game and, of course, that is where I spend the most time.
However, I recently tried out a new Oculus app that is intriguing. The app is called Immersed, and it is quite a trip. With the app on your Oculus Quest and the host software loaded on your Mac, you can have your Mac’s monitor appear in virtual space. They have a lot of options ranging from an alpine cabin, to a “productivity cave”, to a starship. I am currently orbiting the planet Earth on a starship while I compose this blog post. We just flew over Mexico.
If you have never played with a VR device before, they are something else. The resolution is not as high as a retina screen, but the overall impression is that you are someplace else. It is easy to lose track of your actual surroundings while in VR. The above screenshot does not do it justice. It is entirely readable. The surprising thing about Immersed is that it works. I am able to write this post (and several others) with no noticeable lag in typing, and part of me actually thinks I am on a starship. There are, of course, a few downsides:
The screen resolution isn’t nearly as good as my standard monitor. Also, I had to set my monitor display to its largest size to really make this work. That said, I can read and interact with the entire screen with little or no eye strain.
Unlike the keyboard, my wireless mouse can get laggy. Not always, but sometimes. It’s fine for text editing, but lousy for gaming.
You really need to be a touch typist to make this work. You can’t see your keyboard or mouse at all because you are in space, or a cabin, or on top of a mountain, or a creepy cave that is supposed to make you productive.
Facebook! That company that I don’t like makes this thing I have strapped on my head. You can have an account without signing into Facebook, but in order to get this screenshot exported, I had to log in to Facebook for the first time in years. I can only guess what it is going to take for me to unring that bell. Talk about taking one for the team.
Weight and battery life. This app and the connection seems to be burning up my Oculus battery at a rate of 30% per hour. Also, the Oculus itself gets heavy on your head after a while.
After spending a few hours in virtual space, I felt a bit fatigued. I don’t know if it was the screen resolution, the motion of my starship, or the weight of the device on my head, but I was ready to return to Earth. I don’t think I could do this for more than a few hours at a time.
This is really just a first step. I could see myself working in a virtual zen garden or on the planet Endor for extended periods of time once these VR devices get lighter and better. I’m having a great time writing several posts for this week in a spaceship. I may go down to my alpine cabin next for an OmniFocus review session. Seriously, this is fun for a productivity nerd like me. I will report back in a month to tell you if I am still using it or if the shininess wore off. In the meantime, I just passed over Saudi Arabia.
Having built a lot of LEGO sets over the years, I had given very little thought to their user experience (UX) design until I read this by George Cave. Regardless of your feelings about LEGO panels, this article will teach you a lot more about UX than you may expect (via Kottke).
From jotting quick notes to writing for the web, Markdown has become a very popular choice for formatting plain text. Its syntax is human-readable and easy to learn. On this week’s episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I teach Markdown 101, covering the more complex things the language can do.
This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:
Samual Axon at Arts Technica published an interview with Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) chief John Giannandrea concerning the state of AI at Apple.
If you go back enough years, you can see plenty of articles and hear podcasts where I bemoaned Apple’s ability to compete with AI given the fact that they were not willing, for instance, to throw all of our pictures together so they would have one massive server database for the AI gods. Instead, Apple always said they were going to protect user privacy, and while I agreed with the sentiment, I worried about its long term effects.
However, Apple has been turning my opinion around on this over the past several years. This latest article settles my mind entirely on the question. The point that comes through several times is that Apple believes doing AI analysis on a device actually gives the best user experience because the computing is getting done closer to the user.
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“Yes, I understand this perception of bigger models in data centers somehow are more accurate, but it’s actually wrong. It’s actually technically wrong. It’s better to run the model close to the data, rather than moving the data around. And whether that’s location data—like what are you doing— [or] exercise data—what’s the accelerometer doing in your phone—it’s just better to be close to the source of the data, and so it’s also privacy preserving.”
This is the first time I’ve heard someone from Apple explain how their AI model is better because it is faster, and the privacy benefits are icing on the cake. Privacy has always been at the front of that argument. It’s never been the “also”, until now.
I think the reason Apple is starting to talk more about this is the significant lead they have with Apple silicon. I’m just not convinced any other company can pull off AI on the device the way Apple is right now. If anyone at Apple were to ask me, I would say push down the gas pedal with on-device AI as hard as you possibly can.
Wow, are you feeling nostalgic for your old Mac? The macintosh.js project just released a JavaScript emulator that runs Mac OS 8 emulated on a 1991 Macintosh Quadra. It works! I had several minutes of nostalgia—followed by several minutes of realizing things are a lot easier now.
Yesterday marked the release of Day One, version 5. There are several new features of note:
The Today View
Previously called the Activity Feed, the new Today View ties in other data available to Day One, like location data, calendar events, and daily photos. If you tap on a calendar event, it opens a new entry with that event title as the Day One entry title. Clever.
PDF Export
The PDF Export feature has a lot more options than it used to. You can export out of a specific journal but only entries with one tag, but no entries with a different tag. Want to export as CSV? It does that now too. It opens up data export.
The Media Picker
Getting photos and videos into your journal just got easier.
They’ve also added Sign in with Apple, greatly simplifying sign in on your devices. I’m testing out several journaling workflows right now, and this update came just as I’m testing out Day One in earnest—more on this to come.
Jason Snell started a series at Six Colors where he’ll be reviewing 20 Macs for 2020. Jason has so much historical knowledge of the platform that I’m looking forward to seeing what he picks. Jason is a pro—unless he leaves out the Mac SE/30, then he’s a hack.
Spam folders are great—until they are not. If your email client/service decides to start throwing important email into the spam folder, then you’ve got trouble. I had that happen with some customer support emails a few months ago. So I went looking for way to stop an overly aggressive spam filter from upsetting customers without giving up on spam filters entirely.
The solution was with this week’s sponsor, SaneBox. SaneBox adds a pile of email features to your email, no matter what email service you use or what email app you choose. One of those features is the SaneNotSpam folder.
When your @SaneNotSpam folder is enabled, SaneBox constantly monitors your spam folder, looking for emails that might be inbox-worthy. When SaneBox finds one, it is moved into your SaneNotSpam folder. This means that either the person it was sent by or the service that was sending it was considered by the SaneBox algorithms to be normally inbox-worthy. Either way, it lets me find important email without digging through my spam folder.
There are so many more features you get with SaneBox:
Wake up every day to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant.
Defer email for hours, days, or weeks, so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time. They’ve even added a new feature that can optionally auto-reply to snoozed email with something like, “I’m sorry, but I’m underwater right now. I’ll get back to you in a few days.”
Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email, SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.
Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).
Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.
Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.
The list goes on, and MacSparky readers love this service. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account today? If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount on your subscription.
